Let us talk about acquisitions. Two words are used interchangeably, acquisition and takeover. The acquisition means a transaction when a company buys more than 50% of the other company’s shares, and both the parties involved cooperate with this settlement.
On the other hand, the takeover means when a company buys more than 50% of the other company’s shares, but the two parties are not in cooperation. The organization that we will acquire is against the settlement, and thus takeovers typically end up being hostile.
Reasons why companies make acquisitions 
The companies make acquisitions for various reasons-
They want to expand their business, diversify their business line, and reduce the business cost. The other reasons for making the purchases are-
Means to enter the foreign market- Acquisition is instrumental when a business wants to join the foreign market. Suppose a company buys an organization that already has its presence in the foreign lands. In that case, the company gets the brand name, intangible assets, people, and employees, thus helping the company reach the alien lands.
Gain New Technology– Whenever a company wants to use and implement new technology, it is sometimes beneficial to acquire an organization already using this technology. It will benefit the company by reducing the cost and the time incurred in buying and setting up new technology.
Decrease Competition– Whenever there is a lot of competition in the market, acquisition is the best solution to reduce and eliminate the competition and thus focus on the most productive providers.
Biggest acquisition in the history
As noted in October 2021, the largest acquisition taken place in history is of the year 1991, when Vodafone Airtouch plc made a takeover of Mannesmann. They did this deal worth USD 183 billion.
Announcement of an acquisition made
The organization, Coinbase Global, has acquired Agara, as announced on November 02, 2021. It is the first acquisition of the company in India. The deal has been made of an undisclosed amount, and it is expected that the investment will close later this year. According to the rumours, Coinbase will be paying USD 40 million for this deal. This deal would be helpful for Coinbase as it will be able to get access to the deep expertise of the startup in machine learning and natural language processing for the benefit of the company’s engineering team. The company, Coinbase Global, is also engaged in hiring people in the country, India, so that it can expand its region.
About Coinbase
Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, is an American company engaged in operating a cryptocurrency exchange platform. It works remotely and has no headquarters. On April 14, 2021, Coinbase issued its shares for the public and registered itself on the Nasdaq exchange via a direct listing.
The products offered by the company are for both retail and institutional cryptocurrency and other cryptocurrency-related derivatives.
Products for retail traders are-
Coinbase is an application used to buy, store, and trade different cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin.
Coinbase Pro is a professional asset trading platform for digital trading assets.
Coinbase Wallet is an application that allows customers to access decentralized crypto applications using a damp browser.
The products offered for institutional traders are-
Coinbase Prime, which is a trading platform for institutional customers
Coinbase Custody, which is a specialist-level service for institutions that hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with Coinbase.
The other cryptocurrency-related products are-
USD Coin is a stable digital coin that allows customers to exchange US dollars for a cryptocurrency with the same value but traded more quickly.
Coinbase Card, a debit VISA Card, gives the leverage to the customers to spend cryptocurrency.
Coinbase Commerce is a payment service designed especially for merchants.
It has a mobile application that is accessible for both iOS and Android. This year, the company announced its strategy to build a tech hub in the country and hired Pankaj Gupta, the former Google Pay executive, to head its development centre in India.
About Agara 
Founded in 2017, the startup, Agara is engaged in changing how machines interact with humans. It believes that the times have made it clear that delivering an excellent customer experience is a key to success as customers look for real-time conversations to engage with the brand. The startup, Agara, believes that voice conversations should be without friction, barriers, and frustration. It uses the latest Deep Learning advances to build ubiquitous, pleasant, and meaningful machine-led voice conversations accessible to all.
The mission is to bring life into autonomous conversations by making machines understand, interact, and learn better. It has a patented AI technology that enables businesses to deliver human-like experiences over voice. It keeps the customer at the centre and is set to fix the broken customer support experience by building the world’s first fully autonomous Conversational Voice AI. It will set the standards for future bots.
The startup has raised USD 7.5 million from investors like Blume Ventures, RTP Global, and UTEC.
About the founders of the startup
The startup, Agara, was founded by Abhimanyu and Arjun Maheswaran.
Abhimanyu is the co-founder and the CEO of the startup, Agara. He is an Economics Graduate from Sri Ram College of Commerce and an MBA from IIM Calcutta and has more than 14 years of diverse experience across various industries and geographies. He has been closely connected to the technology sector in India and has ventured into startups multiple times.
Arjun Maheswaran is the co-founder and the CTO of the startup, Agara. He is a Master’ in Theoretical Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has more than 12 years of experience in deep learning, most recently from Twitter. He was a part of the Deep Learning Team of Twitter, where he gave efforts to apply Deep Learning at Scale across Twitter for NLP problems.
The startup and the company both are doing great. We hope that this deal does wonders, and we wish both parties a bit of good luck and a bright and prosperous future ahead.
Article Proofread and Edited by Shreedatri Banerjee
